Teacher agency and student diversity in reading education: What do Australian teachers think?

Abstract State-level governments across Australia have made a commitment via public announcements to ensuring that all schools are teaching reading using ‘consistent’, ‘compulsory’, ‘common practice’. Through a mixed-methods questionnaire with 51 schoolteachers from four states across Australia, this paper examines practitioner experiences of teacher agency and student diversity in reading education. The results reveal that teachers’ confidence in teaching reading often varied depending on their students’ reading proficiencies. High levels of confidence were often attributed to prior experience, professional knowledge, professional learning, access to resources, and/or relationships, while lack of confidence was often attributed to a lack of one or more of these factors. The study also found that while lack of agency did not necessarily equate to dissatisfaction with how teachers were expected to teach reading, primary school teachers had far less agency than cross-sector and secondary school teachers and were the most dissatisfied with their practice. The study highlights, at a time of workforce shortages, that teachers’ sense of agency, respectful relationships and professional learning remain problematic within reading education, especially in the primary sector and wherever student and teacher diversity is ignored.